The enormous global surge in the wealth of the wealthy — a surge that Americans of means have now been driving for nearly a half-century — has wealth industry professionals rethinking just who really rates as truly super rich. These investment pros, for many years now, have been defining an “ultra-high-net worth individual” as anyone worth at least $30 million.
That $30 million, the Gulf Analytica consultancy president David Gibson-Moore recently related, used to be comfortably enough to allow for “significant investments across multiple asset classes” — everything from stocks and bonds to real estate and private equity — and still have plenty left over for luxuries like private-jet travel.
These days, says Gibson-Moore, many analysts have upped the “ultra” ante. They’re now considering $100 million as “the new yardstick for anyone who wants to keep their head held high at private equity parties.”
That makes some luxury sense. Simply maintaining a 100-foot-long private yacht today, for instance, can now run as much as $2 million a year.
But relief for the rich feeling this yacht-maintenance squeeze appears to be on the way. Leaders in the new Republican-majority Congress, Politico reports, are already busily debating just how they can most expeditiously lower the already low taxes the richest among us need to pay. Their goal: to at least extend the expiring Trump tax cut originally enacted in 2017.
In 2025, households in America’s top 1 percent will save an average $61,090 thanks to that 2017 tax cut. Households in the top 0.1 percent will pocket even more, with an average savings of $252,300. And households in the bottom 60 percent? They’ll on average save less than $500 each.
“Extending the Trump tax cuts that expire at the end of 2025 — namely, the law’s individual income and estate tax provisions — would provide further windfall benefits to high-income households,” conclude Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysts Chuck Marr, Samantha Jacoby, and George Fenton.
To make matters worse, Marr and his colleagues add, those windfall benefits “would come on top of the large benefits they would continue to receive from the 2017 tax law’s permanent provisions.”
“Tax cuts for people making over $400,000,” the Center analysts conclude, “should end on schedule.”
Keeping to that schedule — given the new Republican control over the House, the Senate, and the White House — will be exceedingly difficult. Welcome to Trump II.
